Strings - Capstone Amal Al Shamsi (1)

falling. The boy was starting to close his eyes. “Are we boring you?” Hamza asked, laughing
quietly.
Neither child responded.
Hamza straightened his back and let out a sigh. With careful movements, he lifted his
legs onto the couch and laid his head on the boy’s feet, startling him.
“You’re going to squish him.”
“Good,” he said.
Haya laughed and moved a finger up to her brother. Jasem held it instinctively, trying to
jerk himself to a sitting position.
“When I was small, I used to run when I heard the girls praying. I was very bad, I would
lay down right in front of them so that they would have to put their heads on me when they got
down. Sometimes my sisters would tickle me or kiss my head before they stood up.”
“Is that allowed?”
“I don’t think making a child happy is forbidden,” Hamza said.
“Then can I do that? When you pray,” Haya said, head hanging back as she grinned at
him.
“You’re not a child,” Hamza said.
“You just said I was a baby.”
“Exactly.”
The girl snickered.
They stayed there for a while until Jasem almost kicked Hamza’s nose clean off. Hamza
sat up, holding the bridge of his nose with a pained smile. “He already knows how to fight back.”
Hamza snickered. “Hold your brother. I’ll go clean my hands.”
He left for the kitchen and ran his hands under the water by the sink. He cupped some of
the cold water to his nose for a while, grimacing.
In the kitchen window, he tried to see his own reflection as if he expected his nose to be
in a completely different area of his face. Reflected in the glass, he saw the hallway and thought
of the back door.
Turning off the tap, he walked down the hallway and left through the door, the sounds
from the TV cut off abruptly as he closed it. He was barefoot but walked around the house
through the garden, finding solace from the sun’s heat in the house’s shadow.
From there, he found his gym shoes in the back of the car and left through the gate.
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